The Push for Clearer MFA Content Detection

The digital advertising landscape is fast-paced, with many topics of discussion swirling and cycling constantly. One topic which has endured of late, from last year’s Brand Safety Week to this year’s conference in Cannes, is Made-for-Advertising content or MFA. Publishers affiliated with the Brand Safety Institute (BSI) are actively lobbying leading measurement firms to provide clearer insights into how platforms flag MFA content. This initiative aims to create a "publisher portal" to assist media owners, especially those with limited resources, in understanding and navigating the intricacies of MFA content detection. The push for this portal stems from concerns that existing guidelines are being manipulated by fraudsters, inadvertently penalizing legitimate publishers. As these developments play out, it bears looking at the discussions happening across the brand safety community concerning the MFA phenomenon.

Brand Safety practitioners have had a love/hate relationship with tools such as inclusion and exclusion lists. When building inclusion or exclusion lists, brand suitability teams should identify MFA sites from the start to ensure valuable inventory for clients' investments. At KINESSO, the team has developed tactics to review and exclude MFA sites, a process requiring manual review and judgment. Indicators such as ad clutter, load times, refresh rates, content quality, and traffic sources help identify MFAs. Checking for ad density, slow loading times, poor content quality, and suspicious traffic sources are basic but useful steps in the review and determination process. Additionally, verifying the site's Privacy Policy, About Us, Contact pages, and ads.txt file to ensure legitimacy and effectiveness brand safety strategies play a part in the success of these efforts.

MFA sites, built for ad arbitrage, feature low-quality content and high ad density, resulting in lower performance. Another firm, Integral Ad Science uses advanced machine learning to identify MFA and Ad Clutter sites, unlike static exclusion lists. Some of this work references findings by the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study, found that MFA sites accounted for 21% of impressions and 15% of ad spend. These findings highlight the need for advertisers to optimize away from these sites to reduce media waste. IAS analysis shows non-MFA sites have a +278% better conversion rate and a 63% lower cost-per-conversion. The IAS MFA Measurement and Optimization solution, supported by Sincera and Jounce Media, uses supply chain data and site characteristics to report on MFA and Ad Clutter metrics.

The development of these tools and methods underscores the strong mindset of brand safety practitioners. The need for improved transparency and more sophisticated tools to differentiate between legitimate and MFA content as advertisers and publishers navigate the landscape is clear. By leveraging advanced measurement tools and fostering industry-wide collaboration, the advertising ecosystem can better protect brand integrity while ensuring fair treatment for all parties involved, ultimately leading to a safer and more equitable digital advertising landscape.